Limited compliance resources? Think smarter, not harder

Whether your firm’s employees use social media, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, or email, all are subject to requirements for retention and oversight, no matter what the medium.

That makes your overall electronic communications supervision process more complex, since companies allow more content channels than ever before. For example, the 2014 Smarsh Electronic Communications Compliance Survey showed the number of electronic messaging channels allowed by financial services firms for business use has nearly doubled in the past three years—from an average of 3.6 channels in 2011 to 6.7 in 2014. That’s a lot of information to manage and supervise!

Conquer the review process, even with constrained resources

Despite the increasing number of content channels to supervise, the Smarsh survey shows the majority of compliance officers at firms expect their resources for the oversight of electronic communications to remain the same, or only slightly increase in the next 12 months.

With more messages to review and a limited amount of time and budget to work with, what’s a compliance officer to do?

To begin, you’ll need a system for your team to review messages that doesn't add a lot of extra time or cost. After all, oversight of electronic communications is a small (but critical) part of the compliance role—and you need a way to work smarter to cut inefficiencies, so you can move on to other important tasks.

Make maximum use of technology

When done well, efficient message supervision of all of your firm’s electronic messages can help you identify regulatory, legal or corporate governance risk, and deliver valuable insights into the business, even when you don’t have any extra resources at hand.

One of the best ways to create this efficiency environment is to start using a universal archiving platform—in other words, a technology solution that helps your team of reviewers oversee a wide variety of content channels, all in one place and at the same time.

What your team members truly want is a reliable and easy-to-use system they can get into fast; do their reviews; escalate any problems; and get out quickly to move onto other responsibilities. They don’t want to be bouncing back and forth between different archiving solutions, trying to piece together conversations that started on Facebook, moved to email, and then ended in a string of instant messages.

Look for specific technology features

A universal archiving platform will help your team review messages from multiple content sources at one time. Each reviewer can search across people, keywords and content types from one screen, creating a comprehensive view of any message or conversations related to a specific subject or identified risk. Look for a universal archiving platform to help you:

• Remove the need to learn different applications. Single-content-type archiving systems are a hassle because reviewers need to acclimate to different workflows across various archive siloes. There are usually multiple passwords and logins to juggle, which adds complexity when a reviewer has to access several archives. In contrast, a universal archiving platform makes it easier to login, move through reviews, and take further action if needed, in one fluid process. It will also take much less time to produce an audit trail (with all reviewer actions recorded in the same platform), and prepare for e-discovery or audit requests.
• Implement and enforce consistent policies across all content types. Reviewers want to find the right information and identify risk fast, but it’s hard to do that if your firm uses several different archiving solutions that have unique policy creation rules and workflows. A universal search platform will help you consistently enforce your firm’s overall communications policy, no matter where a message originated. This improves consistency during reviews, and is especially important for demonstrating uniform and thorough policy enforcement in the event of an audit. Let nothing fall through the cracks!

Avoid the alternative

Is there are way to piece together disparate archiving solutions to make them all work together? There may be, but managed incorrectly, you might find the sacrifices made to fuse technologies together can backfire, and lead to new complications like over-production of content, or time-consuming review processes.

Make the most of technology in 2014, and you’ll be on the road to doing more with less.